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  In 1941 the New York Times noted that “there is every reason why John C. Garand, if he were that kind of an inventor, should put his thumbs in his armpits, puff on his cigar and say, ‘I told you so ten years ago.’ ”8 Garand, who passed away in 1974 at the age of eighty-six still trying to get $100,000 in back compensation, certainly wasn’t that sort of inventor. As a civilian employee of the War Department earning around $6,000 a year, Garand had waived all commercial and foreign rights so that no one could use his invention but the government—literally signing away millions. Of all the famous American gunmakers, he was the one who benefited least financially from his ideas.

  • • •

  The ensuing wars of the twentieth century necessitated a different sort of weapon, one that was lighter and had more flexibility. At the outbreak of the Korean conflict in 1950, American soldiers were outfitted with the same weapons that they had fought with in World War II: the M1, the M1 carbine, the M1911 pistol, and the Browning automatic rifle. By the end of that war, the Americans would face the challenge of combining the advantages of all these weapons into a single lighter firearm.

  The military had begun, for the first time, conducting systematic studies regarding the effectiveness of the weaponry they deployed after World War II. In 1948 the Army organized the civilian Operations Research Office and analyzed millions of battlefield and casualty reports from the two world wars to make recommendations regarding equipment and tactics. The findings didn’t exactly comport with American gun lore, but they did help focus on the types of firearms that would be effective in modern combat.

  What they found was that firepower mattered. This was unsurprising. Marines might have had outstanding marksmanship, but the fact was, the more a soldier fired, and the more of them who did so, the more of the enemy they killed. What was somewhat surprising was how they killed. For one thing, the vast majority of infantrymen engaged in short-range battles, skirmishes, and ambushes, often running into the enemy unexpectedly. This kind of encounter only increased during the wars in Korea and Vietnam and the later conflicts of the twentieth century. Moreover, most soldiers held their fire until the enemy was within 200 yards—the average American held it until the target was within 120 yards—even though the M1 had an effective range of more than 500 yards.9 Perhaps the average soldier felt most comfortable hitting a target within this range, or perhaps long-range opportunities in war presented themselves far less than initially thought.

  Although there is some debate over the actual percentages, despite the ease of use, many infantrymen still did not fire their weapons in combat. Early studies of the Korea conflict noted that soldiers with rapid-fire weapons were more likely to shoot. Some historians have found that it took an average of 7,000 rifle shots to achieve one combat kill during the First World War. That number would increase to 40,000 or more by the Vietnam War. (It was 92,000 bullets per enemy killed in the Iraq War. The United States now fires around 250,000 bullets for every insurgent killed in Afghanistan.) Soldiers needed to be able to fire with more ease.

  It was also clear that the M1 had some serious drawbacks in modern war: it was too heavy, lacked full-automatic capability, and had only an eight-round magazine. Americans went about designing a gun that was both light (to accommodate the realities of warfare in the second half of the twentieth century) and powerful (to assuage conservative military leaders who believed bigger ammunition was necessary to put down the enemy). During World War II, the Germans also concluded that short-range warfare was the rule and began to produce the StG 44, which used a shorter cartridge that permitted controllable automatic fire from a weapon that was more compact than a battle rifle. The gun fired fully automatic like a submachine gun or semiautomatic.

  Garand himself had worked on this problem at Springfield Armory as well, even before the war had ended. He had designed a selective-fire operation—semiautomatic to automatic—and a detachable magazine. It was still heavy, weighing over ten pounds. The Ordnance Department attempted to modify the design and ordered 100,000 in 1945, but the war ended before mass production could begin. Garand stayed on the case, designing what would essentially be an M1 converted into a fully automatic rifle. The new rifle carried a 20-round magazine attached at the bottom.

  The new M14 would never be as beloved as other military weapons. In semiautomatic mode, the rifle was still powerful. In fully automatic mode, most soldiers had true aim only for the first shot, because the recoil made it virtually impossible to control.10 The M14 gradually replaced the M1 rifle as the standard-issue infantry weapon, but as it was being manufactured, forward-looking engineers already had a gun in mind that was far more effective, a lot lighter, and a lot deadlier. It would make the M14’s run short and herald a new age of military applications and private gun ownership.

  19

  FALL AND RISE OF THE SHARPSHOOTER

  “Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on every shot. They all deserved to die.”1

  —Chris Kyle

  A U.S. Army sniper team from the Jalalabad Provincial Reconstruction Team

  On the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay dropped the first atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were instantly killed and around 60,000 would soon die from the effects of the fallout. In one hundred years, mankind had gone from pouring gunpowder and ball down a barrel to incinerating cities in mere seconds. Yet the gun remained. “There would have to be a radical change in warfare to do away with the rifle,” John Garand noted at the end of the war. “Even with atomic bombs, guided missiles, rockets and the rest, foot soldiers with their rifles will be needed to mop up, occupy and hold territory.”

  The incongruous truth of modern warfare was that even as the ham-fisted violence of atomic warfare, booming artillery, and air warfare began to dominate fighting, another, more intricate form of the gun began to emerge. World War II saw the rise of the sniper. Perhaps the most deadly of these fighters was a Finn named Simo Häyhä, who it was maintained had shot down more than five hundred Russians during the Winter War between his country and the Soviet Union in 1939–40. While modern snipers are often equipped with computerized machines measuring wind direction and speed, and even the earth’s curvature—sometimes shooting in excess of a mile—Häyhä wasn’t even in possession of telescopic sights. When asked whether he had any moral quandaries about the great proficiency he displayed in this deadly work, Häyhä simply responded that “I only did what I was told to do, as well as I could.”

  This would be the attitude of many of the men and women who sniped during World War II. The Soviets, quick to develop snipers and doctrines for long-range shooting, boasted of a number of skilled long-range killers, many of whom finished their careers with over 400 recorded kills—including a female Red Army sniper named Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who had 309 under her belt. The Soviets ended with 14,500 confirmed sniper kills during the war, although the number was probably far higher.2

  Even then, until that point, for most nations sniping had been organic rather than doctrinal. The Great War had been a stalemate that created virtually motionless trench emplacements with sudden bursts of violence. It was during the long delays between fighting that the best shots in units would emerge as long-distance killing specialists. Better marksmen spent hours observing the enemy lines, waiting for a soldier, preferably an officer, to forget himself and peek out over a trench. Although no army at the beginning of the war deployed units of sharpshooters for this duty, the German and Austrian Jäger battalions had a tradition of marksmanship that went back to the 1700s. Yet even they were not equipped with any specialized weaponry to provide the necessary accuracy for precision shooting over 300 yards or so.

  Within a year, however, the Germans began converting their standard Mauser rifles and equipping them with excellent telescopic sights for sniper use. Nearly 20,000 of these guns were made during the war. The Germans augmented the weapons by developing an intricate system of camouflage, building ir
regular parapets from material of varying composition and colors to make marksmen less conspicuous to the enemy, poking holes in metal shields and building concrete sniping posts. All of this provoked the British to act.

  Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, a British officer, adventurer, and big-game hunter, created the first Allied school for sniping in August 1916. Though his first graduating class attracted only six men, many of the ideas he implemented proved effective enough to last into World War II. One of them was having two men to work in teams, one with binoculars and the other, in the case of the British, with a Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle with a telescopic lens and powerful precision ammunition. The English were soon matching the Germans in efficiency.

  Despite their long tradition of sharpshooting, Americans came to modern sniping even later than the British. Although Morgan’s Kentucky Riflemen might have been the world’s first military sniper unit and both sides in the Civil War recruited sharpshooters, there was no official military policy on sharpshooting. Still, with breechloaders, percussion-lock rifles, and Minié ball, these men dramatically pushed the boundaries of both accuracy and range. The Union general John Sedgwick, for example, met an ignominious end when a bullet, reportedly fired from over 600 yards by a Confederate sharpshooter armed with a Whitworth rifle, hit him in the face just as he had finished excoriating his men: “Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” were reportedly his final words. As we’ve seen, Hiram Berdan, an inventor and marksman, recruited his own companies of Northern sharpshooters.

  Yet the tradition of sharpshooting ebbed and flowed. After the Civil War, there was widespread consternation among military officers and politicians at what they perceived as an abrupt decline in American marksmanship. Many believed that better aim might have alleviated many of the horrid injuries that accompanied the recent war. To them, it was a scandal that cost-cutting measures allowed post–Civil War infantry to practice with only ten rounds per month.3

  One of these men, William Church, a New York journalist, editor, publisher, and war veteran, was driven to expose how a lack of marksmanship indicated a sign of a lack of patriotism and corrosion of American values. In 1870, Church tapped another concerned friend, a lawyer and former Union officer named George Wingate, to author a series of articles instructing young men on the finer points of accurate shooting. “The general ignorance concerning marksmanship which I found among the soldiers during the Civil War appalled me, and I hoped that I might better the situation,” Wingate wrote.4 The pieces were popular enough to be published as a book titled Manuel for Target Practice, which soon became a bestseller and ignited interest in target shooting around the country.

  Church and Wingate, admirers of Germanic guns and society, looked to shooting clubs run by Central European immigrants that had recently begun popping up around the country. They used the idea as a template for their own organization. The duo launched an organization called the National Rifle Association in November 1871.

  The first president of the NRA was noted Civil War general Ambrose Burnside, who had once remarked that out of “ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn.” The organization intended to do something about it, lobbying for $25,000 from the state of New York to help build a number of ranges in the area, the best one in Creedmoor, Long Island (when the land reverted back to New York years later it would become a famous psychiatric hospital), where they ran classes and shooting competitions.

  The NRA’s most notable moment in the early years occurred when a wealthy Irish lawyer named Arthur Blennerhassett Leech, who had been in charge of numerous shooting clubs in London and Dublin, decided to challenge the American club publicly to a contest of marksmanship, sending an invitation via the New York Herald, at the time the city’s largest paper. The event generated healthy interest across the country. The British had a long history of competitive shooting, and Leech’s squad had been competing in Europe for years. But, as the colorful Irishman noted, it was the first time the British could offer a “peaceful battle to their American cousins.”5 For the still-struggling NRA, the event was much-needed publicity, at the very least. Seven of the NRA’s best shots were chosen to compete. Over 5,000 onlookers showed up at Creedmoor to take in the contest, which involved participants shooting fifteen times at 800, 900, and 1,000 yards. The rifles used by both teams could weigh no more than ten pounds. No telescopic sights or hair triggers were allowed. The American team—which, unlike the Irish, would clean the fouling from their rifles after every shot—won the contest 326–317.

  Leech awarded the Americans a cup inscribed with the message “Presented for Competition to the riflemen of America, by Arthur Blennerhassett Leech, Captain of the International Team of Riflemen, on the occasion of their visit to New York.” The cup accepted by Wingate is still competed for today, the oldest target-shooting trophy in the United States.6 The Irishman wrote about the adventure in a book called Irish Riflemen in New York.7 The contest had been a huge success, spurring many similar ones around the country in the coming years. It was a boon for the National Rifle Association and spurred a national movement for marksmanship.

  While shooting became increasingly popular in America, the military did not feature specialized sharpshooters in the First World War, although it must be noted that no branch of any military places as strong an emphasis on marksmanship as the Marines. “Every Marine is a rifleman” is still a credo for a branch that requires all its servicemen to earn a marksmanship badge. Some claim that the braided quatrefoils on the top of a warrant or commissioned Marine officer’s dress and service cap served as a way for musket-wielding shooters in crow’s nests to recognize them while firing down during battle. Whatever its origins, the desire of Marines to tie their history to long-range shooting is indicative of the importance it plays in the branch’s attitude.

  Marines who landed in Europe during the First World War quickly gained a reputation as good shots. Numerous wartime accounts by the French and Germans mention their proficiency. In one such case, Herman Davis, an infantryman who had grown up refining his skills hunting small game in Arkansas, saved his platoon by taking out a number of machine gunners at Verdun from over 300 yards. For his effort, General Pershing named Davis one of the one hundred heroes of World War I. At Belleau Wood, thirty miles north of Paris, Americans suffered 10,000 casualties, including 1,800 fatalities.8 Pershing referred to it as “the biggest battle since Appomattox and the most considerable engagement American troops had ever had with a foreign enemy.”9 One report to the German command called the Americans “vigorous, self-confident, and remarkable marksmen.”10

  After the war, Marines fielded teams in competitive marksmanship, yet still no sniper school—or countersniper strategies—existed when the Americans entered the Second World War. U.S. soldiers would soon encounter deadly enemy snipers, prompting them to act. Ernie Pyle, the great American Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who would later be killed at Okinawa, wrote about the prevalence of German snipers during D-Day:

  Sniping, as far as I know, is recognized as a legitimate means of warfare. And yet there is something sneaking about it that outrages the American sense of fairness. I had never sensed this before we landed in France and began pushing the Germans back. We had had snipers before—in Bezerte and Cassino and lots of other places, but always on a small scale. There in Normandy the Germans went in for sniping in a wholesale manner. There were snipers everywhere: in trees, in buildings, in piles of wreckage, in the grass. But mainly they were in the high, bushy hedge-rows that form the fences of all the Norman fields and line every roadside and lane.11

  The Marines would be the first to formalize the training of snipers. In 1943 the branch established two schools for the purpose, one at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and the other in Green’s Farm, north of San Diego.12 In 1944 the War Department Basic Field Manual defined the “sniper” as “an expert r
ifleman, well qualified in scouting, whose duty is to pick off key enemy personnel who expose themselves. By eliminating enemy leaders and harassing the troops, sniping softens the enemy’s resistance and weakens his morale.” To achieve this directive, Americans turned to the old Springfield 1903 rifles rather than the M1. The gun featured the same lock as the standard Springfield from the First World War, but the powerful gun’s stock was updated and a scope mounted.13

  U.S.M.C. Winchester M70 Sniper Rifle

  Those who completed the first round of training would be designated “scout-snipers” and were used across the European theater. There was little need for sniping in the Pacific with the short-range fighting and perpetual movement—although, when a single Japanese emplacement was holding down American forward movement in Okinawa, a sharpshooting private named David Cass took it out at a range of around 1,200 yards, perhaps saving hundreds of lives.14

  Once the war ended, so did the dedicated sniper training. The Americans again ran into snipers in Korea, most of whom were Soviet trained and often equipped with brawny Russian-made Mosin-Nagant rifles with telescopic sights. “Constant sniper fire was the scariest part of the war,” one veteran of a combat engineer battalion wrote to his hometown paper. “Snipers were in the hills; they were everywhere. And there were North Korean soldiers in civilian uniforms. On my first job of driving a grader, the sniper bullets were so close you could hear what sounded like the snapping of a whip at a circus. It was the sweetest sound in the world when you would hear that because you knew the bullet had missed you.”15